


The Rain is Full of Ghosts Tonight

by theaa



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Jon Snow is King-Beyond-the-Wall, Post-Canon Fix-It, Post-Finale, Sansa Stark is Queen in the North, bc c'mon there's TWO of them, but we're gonna have to go through the angst first sorry folks, inspired by Sansa's QITN direwolves crown, she said 'they lost their King' to Jon, what am I meant to think????
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-23
Updated: 2019-05-26
Packaged: 2020-03-10 02:44:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18929692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theaa/pseuds/theaa
Summary: The hammered silver is intricate. Two direwolves meet at the front, one protecting the throat of the other with sharp metal teeth like wolves do in the wild. It is just what she envisioned.Sansa and Jon find their way back to each other.What if the Wolves come?Yield.And so, they must yield to each other.





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> I blame Michelle Clapton. Lay your tears at her feet, not mine. (Kidding, I'm in this pain with you guys.)

The day of Sansa’s coronation dawns weak and silvery. Winterfell remains in ruins, but Sansa can already see men milling around the courtyard, preparing to start their work before the feast in the evening. She draws back from the window and pulls her dressing gown more tightly around her, pulling at the sash. Walking to her desk, she picks up the parchment she’d abandoned late the previous night – a missive to Jon. She hesitates again, fingering the smudged ink, the soft edge of the paper. Pointless to send it now, of course.

No one has seen Jon for many moons since he abandoned the wall to head true north with the wildlings. Sansa sinks to sit in her chair and moves to light a candle, staring into the tiny burst of flame as the wax begins to melt.

She does not blame Jon. Truly, she does not. Castle Black is practically abandoned these days, its purpose waning, what with the defeat of the Others and peace with the Wildlings. Perhaps Jon needs to live on his own terms for a while, party to no politics, where the guilt and the horror of the events in King’s Landing feel far away, another world entirely. She can understand that. She does not begrudge him that. They all need space and time to heal.

But not forever. Surely, not forever.

When there is enough liquid wax she tips the candle to pour it gently onto the parchment and presses the Stark sigil stamp into the soft resin.

She long gave up the hope of seeing Jon at her coronation, her previous ravens to the Wall had gone unanswered. And ravens will never find him beyond the Wall. And yet…

She wants him to know that she was thinking of him, this day, this morning.  

She rereads the script, the slanted careful letters, and wonders if they are too much, or perhaps if they are too little.

Too late. Certainly that.

_Jon,_

_I write this hoping that if and when this message finds you, it finds you well. There are whisperings of a new King beyond the Wall in the North. Tell me it is true? You were born to rule, after all. I have stood witness to that. I saw the truth of it once. I shall be glad if you have regained that for yourself._

_I have heard it said that heavy is the head that wears the crown. Perhaps we shall have that in common after all. The coronation is set for only a few hours from my time of writing. I suppose I shall have to find that out for myself. By the time you read this, I will be Queen in the North._

_Where are you, Jon? Please, come home to Winterfell. None here shall harm you._

_Come home to me._

_Ever yours,_

_Sansa Stark_

To Sansa’s eyes, the words might as well be written in blood, the beating blood of her heart, for the feeling of having spilled it onto the parchment when composing the short letter. Perhaps he will never read it, like the others. Perhaps he will, and ignore it still. Which is worse?

She rolls it into a scroll anyway and calls a servant to have it sent to Castle Black. If her staff notice the frequency of Ravens to the wall, they do not make comment. Sansa is grateful for this small awarded dignity.

Later in the day, when she has been updated on the re-building work and other important issues, Sansa returns to her chambers. Laid out on the bed is the coronation dress that she herself and a few girls on her staff have worked on for so long. She moves towards it, trailing her fingers over the stitched direwolf, the red weirwood leaves, the Tully scales on the sleeve. She has poured her whole family into the dress, and it is beautiful. Sansa knows beauty is not everything, but she can admit to wanting to feel beautiful for tonight. It is its own kind of armor.

Laid out beside the dress is the asymmetrical cloak, fashioned after the ones that Arya favored, a rich dark black fur. It sits over her heart when worn. She supposes it is incorrect now that Jon has joined the Wildlings again, but she thinks back to their first reunion all those years ago in the Castle Black courtyard, surrounded by men of the Night’s Watch. Besides, she allows herself a wry smile, black was always Jon’s color.

There sits a plain wooden box next to the cloak and Sansa pauses with her hand outstretched, a slight lump in her throat before she opens the catch and reaches in to lift the delicate crown from inside. It is Gendry’s work, fashioned in Winterfell’s forge before he took up his position at Storm’s End. A gift. A gesture. A labor of love, Sansa thinks, for the sister of the woman he wishes to follow across the world, but can not.

The hammered silver is intricate. Two direwolves meet at the front, one protecting the throat of the other with sharp metal teeth like wolves do in the wild. It is just what she envisioned. Gendry’s artistry is refined for someone who hails from Flea Bottom, and he has not disappointed her. She sets the coronet aside on the furs on her bed. And then she lifts out the second crown. Larger, with a thicker band, a darker silver, but the two direwolves are the same.

She had it commissioned months ago, along with the other one, almost as soon as she returned from King’s Landing when Jon was still a ranger at the Wall, and she thought — naively? — that, with the Unsullied mostly gone from Westeros, that she could simply pardon Jon and bring him home. But, worried about disturbing such newly created, easily fractured peace, she’d convinced herself to wait. She sent the raven on the very day that she first heard the whispers of Jon leaving the Wall for good. Winter was thawing, slowly and steadily, but the news had almost shattered her heart.

And now she has two crowns. Two direwolves. But only one coronation ceremony.

The blood of Winterfell, both of them, no matter whose seed Jon was borne from. She told Jon, standing on the docks in King’s Landing, the heat heavy upon her back, that the North had lost their King. Foolishly, she’s begun to hope that such loss was only an impermanence. The North has always chosen its own leaders. Who was anyone else to tell them otherwise? Not in the Independent kingdom she had created.

 _Jon_.

She thinks of his solemn, long face, imagines soft snow melting in his curls, imagines the crown she had fashioned for him resting upon them, wild and untamed.

A smile again pulls at her lips. Perhaps he’d only wear it the once. He’d likely hate the importance of it. The Kings in the North didn’t usually don true crowns, but Sansa had wanted to mark the occasion with the gravitas she thought it deserved.

Outside, the snow has melted into a soft sleeting rain, a sure sign of the coming Spring. It sounds a gentle rhythm on the window panes and Sansa is grateful she is warm and indoors. She hopes that Jon too is tucked into a Wildling tent and sat before a roaring fire.

She will not think of whether there is a Wildling woman pressed into his side. These are the things she only allows herself to think about on the nights where, alone in bed, she can not sleep for thinking about the wars that have passed and the family she has lost. On those nights, one more painful thought hardly makes the difference.

She sets Jon’s crown back into the box with a twist of her lips and then moves to slip it into a drawer in her desk. It will wait for him, she thinks. She will wait for him.

A serving girl helps her into the dress and brushes out her hair until it gleams in the firelight. She leaves it loose and heavy, some soft sort of rebellion. When they place the Stark crown atop her head it fits snugly and she straightens to look at the Northmen, on their knees before her. There is pride at that moment, relief too, and there is longing.

She looks left first, a subconscious search for Jon’s silhouette next to hers, but no, of course, he is not there. She wears the crown, and there is no one to share it with her. It doesn’t fit. There are two direwolves, not one. Her eyes drift over the rest of the faces, lords and ladies and townspeople and servants,  all of them her subjects, all of them declaring their support, shouting it to the ceiling, but not a face she knows intimately among them.

Later, when the feast is well underway and many of the men are well into their cups, Sansa excuses herself from a conversation with a young Lordling, now head of his small house, and sets down her goblet of wine. She is tired. There is little to keep her in the hall if she does not wish to be there, after all, so she says her thank yous and bids the people goodnight.

Her dress feels heavier than it did when she was laced into it only hours previously. The long sleeves pull on her wrists as she climbs the stairs, material catching on the stone. She has just reached her chamber doors when a servant steps out of the shadows.

‘There is a rider, Your Grace. Outside the castle walls.’

‘Only one? They are alone?’

‘There is a beast with him.’ The servant’s eyes drift upwards, to the crown still nestled in her hair. ‘A wolf, Your Grace.’

Sansa’s heart seizes and then resumes its pace, at thrice the speed.

‘Oh.’ She forces herself to regain her newly-attained queenly composure. ‘Let him in. Show him to my rooms.’

‘You know this man, Your Grace?’

Does she know this man? The man who stands outside her gates, presumably in his Wildling garb? No, that man she does not know. He is a stranger to her. Yet the thought does not unsettle her. 

She looks at the servant sharply for his question. ‘Let him in. Be discreet about it.’

The boy has the sense to look apologetic. ’Yes, Your Grace.’ Sansa watches him walk away and thinks of the crown, hidden in her desk. Somehow, she doubts she will be able to give it to him.

 _Jon_.

Outside, she hears the castle gates creak open. 


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jon and Sansa get the chance to talk.

Sansa sits at her desk, her hands clasped tightly in her lap, waiting for the knock on her door that tells her that Jon is in the castle, finally _here_. The miles of frozen, icy ground that have separated them – how easily they reduce to just a few footsteps.

 

She hears movement outside her door and her fingers bunch in the heavy, quilted material of her dress, which falls over her knees and settles in waves around her onto the flagstones. She didn’t wish to greet him in it – it’s too ostentatious, designed to be so; it is the Queen in The North’s dress, and right now she desperately wants to just be _Sansa_. Perhaps it is because she is not sure that it will be _Jon_ as she knows him that will soon stand before her.

 

Sure enough, the knock on her door comes, loud and echoing. Thankfully, her response to enter does not waver and betrays none of the anxiety that is currently crawling up her spine.

 

The door swings open and outside is her guard, who to his credit displays no emotion at this highly irregular nighttime visit. Behind him, stood against the opposite wall is a shadowy figure. In the candlelight Sansa sees a large pale hand resting on the pommel of a sword. A pommel shaped like a white wolf.

 

‘Your Grace,’ her guard bobs his head and retreats until Sansa realizes she has stood up and is almost at the threshold of her chambers, peering out into the darkened corridor.

 

‘Your Grace,’ repeats a deep northern rumble, so familiar that for a second it knocks the breath out of Sansa’s chest. There’s a tiny, subtle twist of wry amusement in his delivery – and when Sansa registers that… that’s when she begins to hope that everything might not be so bad as she imagined.

 

He steps forward into the light and Sansa takes in his wildling furs, rough and heavy, and his hair, a twist of inky curls, free from the leather tie she had been accustomed to seeing them caught in. A free man stands before her. Leader of the Free Folk.

 

‘Jon. You’re here.’

 

‘Aye,’ he says simply. ‘I’m here.’

 

'Where is Ghost?' she asks, looking beyond him for his white shadow, but finding nothing.

 

'Outside the castle walls. Hunting, I suspect.' 

 

She thought to fuss over the direwolf again and his reply is a disappointment. She steps back from the doorway and Jon enters slowly. He appears, in the flickering candlelight, almost larger than life, but Sansa supposes that’s because she still can’t truly trust her own senses that he is right there in front of her, in Winterfell once more. She had sent so many ravens, but did she really think he would ever heed them?

 

She stands before him, arms useless by her side as he approaches, unsure of whether she should throw them around him now, or wait until later. And then, she watches as he falls slowly to one knee at her feet.

 

‘Jon,’ she says, half surprised, half embarrassed, her hands already grabbing at the air as if to make him rise. ‘Jon, please get up.’

 

The sight of him kneeling before her, as befits a true queen, does something queer to her insides. Makes them clench and roil with uneasiness, but also some pride too – she is not above admitting that. There is so much that separates them, these days. There is so much that they never had a chance to say in those few scant minutes at King’s Landing, in what feels like a lifetime ago.

 

He tips his face upwards and Sansa drinks it in, the somber set of his brow, the slate grey of his eyes, the flat line of his mouth, all so achingly familiar. His lips twitch just a fraction when he registers her outstretched arms and awkwardness and he rises again.

 

‘I thought the Free Folk do not kneel,’ is the first true sentence she says to him, and it is not the way she imagined this conversation beginning, never in any of the times she’s spent dreaming about their meeting before she let herself be carried to sleep at night. Her voice is too flat, the distance between them threatens to open up again and rend Winterfell in half, her one side of the rubble, he on the other. She clasps her hands at her front again, holding them against her swooping stomach.

 

‘We don’t, generally,’ Jon replies. ‘But I am not beyond courtesies, Your Grace.’

 

There is still the rumble of hidden familiarity in his words, but Sansa blinks at his coolness, as if it does not justly match the pretense of her own. This is a mummer’s farce, she thinks. As if the tone of her ravens had not been abundantly clear. Had she not pardoned him, practically begged him to come home? And yet, she knows not how to address him now.

 

‘Do people address you as Your Grace also?’

 

‘They don’t tend to, no, unless in jest.’

 

There is a beat of silence, and Sansa takes an impulsive step forward, her dress rustling behind her.

 

‘ _Jon_.’

 

She half expects him to move back or away, but he doesn’t, and Sansa comes up level with him, close enough to see his eyelashes, close enough to see that his hair is still slightly damp from the rain outside.

 

He smiles then, unexpectedly, crooked and slow. ‘Hello, Sansa.’

 

At the sound of her name Sansa cannot help herself, she loops her arms around his neck and pulls him close, burying her face in the thick Wildling furs around his shoulders. She can feel him freeze and hesitate, but then a hand grips her hip and another presses against the small of her back until there is no space between them, and it feels so _sweet_ to hold him again, to feel him in her arms.

 

She releases him first, self-conscious about holding him against his will, and when she draws back Jon’s face has lapsed back into a frown as he looks at her.

 

‘Your dress…’

 

She fidgets, straightening her shoulders. Does he think it too fine? A needless indulgence, when outside the Winter stubbornly lingers, if not in the weather, but in their depleted food stores, in the ruins of the castle around them? Sansa admits that she once thought so, but a longing for beauty has always been one of her weaknesses, and when she began work on this dress, she never thought it would turn out so intricate, but she kept designing and adding things, trying to stitch each member of her family she missed into the gown.

 

‘… it’s beautiful,’ Jon finishes. Sansa flushes, high and warm. She knows that, though loyal, the Northmen daub her as somewhat of an Ice queen, impervious to showing extremes of emotion. It is not meant as an insult, she gathers, rather just an observation. But they forget there has always been one person capable of breaking through those barriers she has erected, and it has always been Jon.

 

He reaches out a leather gloved hand to trace over the Tully scales of her sleeve and brushes over an embroidered Weirwood leaf. ‘For my mother, and Bran,’ she explains.

 

His eyes move over to the cloak, still pinned to her shoulders, tufts of black fur, and he raises an eyebrow.

 

‘Yes, for you.  And for Rickon, I suppose. But, mostly you.’

 

He nods at her slowly, his expression inscrutable, and then turns away, towards the window. Sansa takes the opportunity to remove the direwolf crown from her head. She sets it gently on her desk, directly on top of its other half in the drawer below. Her gaze lingers on it for a second, until she forces herself to look back to where his silhouette fills the window frame.

 

‘Did you receive my raven, then?

 

He can’t have gotten the one she sent only this morning, but she’s sent any number before, all saying much the same thing.

 

He speaks still with his back to her, which with any other person she might point out as rudeness, but then again he is a King himself, is he not? Just not of the Kingdom she wanted for him.

 

‘I did. I check back at the Wall regularly. I’m usually passed on any messages I receive, eventually.’

 

She says nothing in reply. He did ignore her, then. She is suddenly not sure of his presence in her chambers so late at night. What does it mean that he ignored her? When she last saw him, he told her that as Ned Stark’s daughter, she was the best the North could hope for. Does he still resent her then, for telling his secret? For wanting better for him? For wanting better for the people?

 

He faces her again. Sansa eyes the rough hem of his cloak, the furs strapped even to his boots. She’s never seen him thus.

 

‘You pardoned me. Did you have the power to do so?’

 

She frowns at his question. ‘Jon, the Wall and Castle Black are within my territory as Queen. They sent you to the Wall. That no one has seen fit to check that you remained there is their failing and nothing to do with me, and besides with Bran as King, your cousin, do you really think they would enforce it? I pardoned you, as I saw no real objections forthcoming, with the Unsullied gone from Westeros. You would not challenge Bran his throne, and you are technically my subject, though you now protest it, of course.’ She falls quiet and looks down at the floor. ‘The Free Folk recognize no leader that can offer them pardon, I suppose. So perhaps you consider that the point is moot.’

 

‘The point is not moot, Sansa,’ Jon says sharply. ‘I just… I don’t trust it. And I have made my home amongst the Wildlings now and I am their leader, whether I am pardoned or not.’

 

‘You don’t trust me?’

 

‘That is not what I meant.’

 

‘Then what do you mean, Jon?’ she says, suddenly exasperated, exhausted by this conversation, though it has just begun. ‘What do you mean by appearing here, on the night of my coronation? What do you _want_ from me?’

 

‘I didn’t know it was your coronation. I only guessed when I heard the feast and people talking.’

 

‘Well, you have very coincidental timing,’ she says dryly.

 

This conversation is spinning even further from her, and Sansa can already feel herself begin to mourn their easy reunion she had built up in her head.

 

Jon shakes his head at her. ‘I don’t…. I don’t—’

 

‘Don’t _what_ , Jon,’ she snaps.

 

‘I don’t know how to be the man you want me to be anymore, Sansa. In your raven, you asked me to come home, but I couldn’t because I don’t know where home truly is anymore. Don’t you see?’

 

Now it is her turn to shake her head. ‘Jon, your home is here, in Winterfell. We are both stronger within the walls of Winterfell. We always were. We took it back together, remember? I always thought you’d return to it eventually.’

 

‘Sansa, the things I did, the mistakes I made. You cannot think I’m worthy to even walk these halls again.’

 

And now they get to the crux of the matter.

 

‘You loved her.’

 

Jon flinches, visibly and hard, his hands curling into fists at his side. ‘I needed her. I was blind, or perhaps I just didn’t want to see,’ he croaks. ‘At first, I loved her maybe, when I thought her righteous, and then more perhaps when I realized that with her I could secure the army against the dead, but I never-- I never thought to take it so far, I never thought she would….’

 

His face crumples then and he heaves in a shuddering breath. Sansa moves towards him instinctively, catching up his hands with her own to squeeze them protectively. She does not mourn Daenerys Targaryen, but she understands that Jon does, if only the _idea_ of her. Even months later when she arrived in King’s Landing to find Jon prisoner, ash still lined the streets like a carpet and she could almost sense the screams of the innocents trapped within the rubble of the city. She hates to imagine what Jon experienced, seeing the woman he had pledged himself to turn the world around him to cinders. But imagine it she has done, and she understands in those darkest moments why Jon took himself away.

 

‘Jon, Jon, I know,’ she hushes, ‘I know you never expected it. I know it hurt you to do it, but she would have wrecked Westeros further had she the chance. You did the right thing.’

 

Jon nods dumbly, but she wonders if he is listening or lost to the past. Would the Dragon Queen always be a ghost between them now?

 

‘I’m sorry I was not able to save you from the Wall,’ she says softly. ‘You should have been here. You should have been with me.’

 

Jon looks up at her again, his grey eyes darkened, almost black. ‘I wanted to be. But I don’t fit here anymore, Sansa. What would they whisper of me? Queenslayer and kinslayer, the King who gave up the North? Sansa, I can’t. And the Wildlings care for none of that. It’s easier, up there.’

 

Sansa’s hands tighten around his. ‘Jon, you can’t keep hiding behind the Wildlings.’ She takes a deep breath. ‘You are those things, yes, I will not lie to you. But for good reason. You are still an honorable man, Jon.’ Her voice is pleading, cajoling, anything to make him listen.

 

‘There was no honor in her death,’ he whispers.

 

Sansa closes her eyes. ‘I was not there Jon. I wish to Gods that I had been, but I wasn’t, so I won’t pretend to understand what truly happened, and yes even perhaps it could have happened in a different way, but how are we to know? She was dangerous Jon. You knew that. You had to act. Don’t torture yourself with the what ifs.’

 

Sage advice. Perhaps she should take it herself. Gods know she spends enough of her time playing the same game herself. What if she never told Tyrion? What if she took the Northern army to King’s Landing sooner? What if she had protested Jon’s punishment harder?

 

None of it helps. And it will not help Jon, either.

 

She gives his hands a last squeeze and then drops them, walking back to her desk and the flagon of water on top of it. She pours herself a glass. There is a scratch in her throat and she wishes for wine but did not think to send any to her rooms after the feast. Jon’s eyes follow her movements. She lowers her glass again and surveys him over the top of it.

 

‘Why are you here, Jon?’ she asks again, more softly. ‘If you did not come to accept my pardon.’

 

‘I wanted to... I wanted to see you. I wanted to see how the North was faring.’ She sees him swallow. ‘I missed you.’

 

Her stomach swoops once more and she closes her eyes against the image of him stood by the stone walls of her room, looking so lost and bereft, instead of the happiness with which she imagined him saying so.

 

‘Well, here we are. What are your observations?’

 

‘I didn’t recognize any of your guards on the way in. Where is Brienne?’

 

‘South, with Bran. I asked it of her.’

 

‘You have no one here with you?’

 

‘I have the North. The North has me.’

 

Jon frowns at her. ‘Sansa, The North isn’t a friend you can talk to in the evenings…’

 

No, Sansa thinks, it is not. But with Arya halfway across the world, Bran in King’s Landing with Brienne and Pod, Gendry in his rightful position in Storm’s End, and all those lost to her, she has not been left with many choices. She takes another sip of water as her eyes begin to sting.

 

‘There was a time when I thought to have you to talk to in the evenings, before you went beyond the Wall, where my ravens couldn’t follow.’

 

She hears Jon’s rattled intake of breath from across the room. ‘Sansa….’

 

‘You have not forgiven yourself,’ she says flatly. ‘My forgiveness means nothing. You will not stay.’ A statement, rather than a question. Jon flinches again.

 

‘Sansa, I….’

 

‘Or perhaps you have not forgiven me. Is that it? I’m sorry if I tried to force the crown on you, Jon. I was only trying to keep you safe, keep the North safe. I thought if people knew how valuable you were, that you’d be protected. In the end, it came to nothing.’

 

‘Sansa I know you did what you thought was right.’

 

‘But you don’t agree with my actions?’

 

‘I’m not in any position to judge anyone on their actions any longer. And besides, you’re Queen now. The North owes you its independence.’

 

She whirls away from him, frustrated by his answers, her fingers curling tightly around her goblet. She wants to _weep_ , weep for the dreams she had for them both, weep for the loneliness she can already feel beginning to creep back in, though he stands only a few feet away.

 

‘Sansa.’

 

There are footsteps on the stone behind her and Jon’s hand rests on her forearm. She feels the heat of his body through the thick material of her dress.

 

‘Sansa, please.’

 

She turns to face him slowly. He is much too close again, his pupils wide and black. His breaths are heavy and unsteady, matching her own.

 

‘I love you,’ she whispers. ‘I fought for you. I forgive you. Does that mean nothing to you?’

 

His hand comes up to wipe away the tears that have escaped, unknown to her, with the soft pad of his thumb.

 

‘Sansa, please don’t ask it of me. Not yet.’

 

More angry tears follow until Jon gives up on brushing them away and just cradles her cheeks instead in his rough calloused palms. ‘You won’t find the forgiveness you need out there, Jon.’ She flings an arm out towards the window, towards his _true north_. ‘You have to forgive _yourself_ , and you could do that here, with _me_.’

 

Jon’s thumbs stroke at her skin, but what should be soft and comforting, isn’t. She brings up her own palms to his face, crossing her arms over his until they are locked in an embrace with too much space between them.

 

So she closes it. She pulls him towards her and does something desperate, something she’s only half-entertained, something she dreamed of happening, but in another time, in another conversation. His lips are dry and chapped, but she presses against them with her own, softly at first, waiting with her stomach clenched for him to rear back, break away, but he doesn’t, and when Sansa tries again he kisses her back. He kisses her back _feverishly_ , his hands tightening and slipping to cradle her neck. He catches her bottom lip between his own and Sansa can’t help the moan that she lets out, the way her hands fall to his shoulders and claw at them to try and somehow bring him closer. They break apart, gasping, until Jon this time leans back in, his tongue slipping to dance with hers, with a matched desperation she can almost taste.

 

Eventually, Jon wrenches himself away and just stares at her, and Sansa can see his chest rising and falling with the force of his breathing.  

 

‘Tormund keeps telling me to steal a Wildling woman,’ he says abruptly.

 

‘And have you?’

 

‘No.’

 

‘Do you want to?’

 

‘No.’

 

They continue to stare at each other.

 

‘I can’t steal you.’

 

Sansa smiles at that, small and gone in a second. ‘No, you can’t.’

 

‘You don’t belong up there.’

 

‘Neither do you,’ she replies softly.

 

‘So what do we do now?’ Jon asks.

 

Sansa wants to reach for him again. It was easier when they weren’t talking, when she could hold him close without words getting between them. She misses his lips, the feel of his body against hers already. She registers wryly that it is probably the happiest kiss she has ever had, but that is not saying much at all.

 

She shrugs. Her dress, that she’d almost forgotten she was wearing, is too tight, the metal bodice too restrictive. She wants to take it off. She wants to sleep, to lay down with Jon next to her like she did those few times at Castle Black and on the road to Winterfell when beds were scarce and each other’s company sacred. She wants that back. She never thought to miss it before.

 

‘I don’t know, Jon’ she says simply, her voice drained of emotion, too tired to conjure it up. ‘You’ll have to tell me.’

 

No, she doesn't know this man in front of her. And more importantly, he no longer knows himself. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was very 'ouchy' to write. I'm sorry. You can forgive Michele Clapton now, this one's all on me.


End file.
